Last year, Julian Ha of Heidrick & Struggles said the swamp was “constipated,” as the lobbying world continued adjusting to the Trump administration and Congress. And now? Things are starting to flow again. Ha and CQ Roll Call lobbying reporter Kate Ackley discuss the state of lobbying, 2019 edition.
The following article by Lachlan Markay was posted on the Daily Beast website November 2, 2017:
To hear the White House tell it, Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of good government. Aides point to the downfall this week of a leading Democratic lobbyist and the lower spending on lobbying in general as evidence that influence peddling and backroom dealing are increasingly relics.
But if you scratch beneath the surface just a little bit, these White House claims fall apart.
The truth, argues Brendan Fischer, the directors of federal reform programs at the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, is that “despite Trump’s drain the swamp rhetoric the swamp has only grown deeper.” Continue reading “Trump Claims Takes a Premature Victory Lap, or Two, in His Fight Against ‘The Swamp’”
The following article by Dennis Jett was posted on the Washington Post website May 22, 2017:
In his campaign for president, Donald Trump famously promised to “drain the swamp” and do things differently. One way the president can do that is with the people he nominates for key positions in government. And although Trump’s Supreme Court and Cabinet nominees — and, now, the next FBI nominee — have garnered a lot of attention, his nominees for ambassadors have earned far less. But in the initial nominations for ambassador, there is an important lesson: Trump isn’t going to do things differently from his predecessors, and he isn’t draining the swamp.
Presidents love to give ambassadorships to friends and donors
Although the president of the United States is the most powerful man in the world, he actually has few ways to pay off his supporters. Unlike the queen of England, he cannot bestow a royal title on anyone. But being named ambassador comes pretty close. Continue reading “Trump’s nominations for U.S. ambassador are hardly draining the swamp”
The following article by Justin Elliott was posted on the ProPublica website February 10, 2017:
Geoff Burr spent much of the last decade as the chief lobbyist for a powerful construction industry trade group. Burr sought to influence a host of regulations of the Department of Labor, opposing wage standards for federal construction contracts and working against an effort to limit workers’ exposure to dangerous silica dust.
In the Obama administration, someone like Burr would have been barred by ethics rules from taking a job at an agency that he had lobbied. Continue reading “Trump’s Watered-Down Ethics Rules Let a Lobbyist Help Run an Agency He Lobbied”
The following article by Emily Cadei was posted on the Newsweek article February 8, 2017:
Al Mottur admits to not only counting his chickens before they hatched but putting out all the fixings for a fried chicken feast. The veteran Democratic lobbyist went into Election Day assuming Hillary Clinton would be America’s 45th president, and as a member of Clinton’s national finance committee who helped raise more than $1 million for her campaign, that would have been a victory not just for his party but also for his bottom line. “I was thinking, This is going to be great for my firm,” recalls Mottur, a senior partner at D.C. lobbying powerhouse Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber and Schreck, which represents such companies as Anheuser-Busch, FedEx and Comcast. Continue reading “The ‘Swamp’ Donald Trump Promised to ‘Drain’ is Growing Again”
